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One of last year’s breakout successes in the multiplayer game-space was Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2, which aimed to spread democracy across the stars via shooting aliens and robots with lots and lots of bullets. Now, hot off the heels of releasing their monolithic board game adaptation of Elden Ring, Steamforged Games is doing another adaptation of a video game: the fast-paced and frenetic experience of Helldivers 2. The board game is now available to back on Gamefound – and IGN had a chance to play a prototype of the game and sit down with designers Jamie Perkins, Derek Funkhouser, and Nicholas Yu to pick their brains about this new tabletop rendition.
Having begun its development shortly after the launch of the video game early last year, Helldivers 2: The Board Game captures a majority of what has made the video game so popular and exciting, recreating the tense fire fights, chaotic surprises, and teamwork-centric experience while also offering its own little tweaks to the formula.
Helldivers 2 remains a purely cooperative objective-based skirmish game where one to four players (the designers recommend solo players play using two characters) work together to complete the selected objective while surviving the mobs of enemies and events that pop up. Each player takes on the role of a different class of Helldiver, each having a unique perk, a set of action cards to use on their turn, and a powerful one-per-game “Act of Valor” ability. The demo included the Heavy, Sniper, Pyro, and the Captain. Each player outfits themselves with a kit consisting of primary, secondary, and support guns, a grenade, and three strategems they can call in, with a recommended loadout listed on their class card. Still, once you know what you’re doing, you can choose before a game.
Gameplay takes place on grid-based boards that grow as you explore, requiring you to place down new boards, which reveal various sub-objectives you can try for, along with the locations where your primary objectives can be found – which, in my prototype’s case, are the various Terminid hatcherys to destroy. As you explore, more and more difficult enemies begin to spawn, and with the mission timer that puts a round-limit on how long you can take to complete your objective and evacuate, it all keeps games of Helldivers feeling frenetic and tense.
The prototype I played only had one objective, tasking me to destroy a certain number of Terminad hatcheries, but the actual release will offer a number of options. Regarding the enemies, Jamie explained that the base game would include two of three main factions – the aforemention Terminads and the robotic Automatons – with each faction featuring 10 unit types. While they couldn’t confirm anything, knowing Steamforged Games and their tendency for stretch goals in their campaigns, I bet we will see the Illuminate via an expansion.
Perhaps the aspect I was more curious to check out with this video-game-to-board-game adaptation was how it would handle the game’s sense of being overwhelmed and outnumbered. Would it go a similar route as the Zombicide games and try to stop me with numbers, with creatures that, while easy to kill, would quickly overwhelm the helldivers with their sheer numbers? Or would it opt for something more akin to Nemesis, where the threat came more from fewer but stronger enemies? Helldivers opts for the latter, with a more tactical close-up fight approach with progressively more challenging enemies spawning the further into a mission you go.
Turns consist of players and enemies adding their action cards to a pool, everything getting shuffled and then placed down onto the initiative tracker (very similar to Steamforged’s Elden Ring game), with combat based on dice rolls. One neat addition is that for every four action cards that are played, a random event occurs, which tended to throw a wrench into our plans, such as spawning a bunch of horde enemies or randomly spawning another enemy to contend with, normally followed by a few expletives being hurled. It’s a good time.
On the side of the Helldivers, combat is handled by way of dice rolls with each weapon offering its type and number of dice for the player to roll, with each damage being determined by the total value of the roll. For every five points, a single wound is placed on an enemy. I enjoy this approach to damage, as it can get confusing and annoying if you need to account for various modifiers and defense values or even see if you hit. In Helldivers, being the elite trained soldiers of democracy that you are, you always hit – the only question is how much pain do you dish out. Sure, there is a chance you may hit your friends in the process – especially with attacks that hit an area – but sometimes, to take out a particularly persistent and annoying enemy, you have to sacrifice your fellow Helldiver (thank goodness for reinforcements).
Something brand new to this board game that the designers are especially proud of is the ‘Massed Fire’ mechanic, which aims to recreate the feeling of you and your friends all firing on the same enemy in the video game.
“In the video game, obviously, you’re encouraged to work together as a team,” Nic explained. “You have a heavily armored armor enemy, you need to kind of flank around and shoot at the weak points if you don’t have a support weapon to deal with it. But there wasn’t a really good way to do that in a board game without going to lot of facing and armor mechanics. So what we implemented was we called ‘massed fire,’ so when anyone shoots at a target, if that’s within range of another helldivers primary, secondary target, they can also focus far with you at that time, and so you’re kind of explicitly rewarded or incentivized to work as a group.”
The designers made it clear players can always go off lone-wolf style and explore on their own if they wish, but what I appreciate the most with this addition is that it helps cut down on player downtime, allowing some involvement during other players’ turns and a chance to roll more dice. Both of these things are always a plus in my book.
When it comes to enemies, though, things are a bit more bland with them simply doing a set amount of damage or effects dictated by what’s on their card, causing the player to draw wound cards. Each wound causes some sort of detrimental effect, and if a player ever gets three wounds, their character dies. Death isn’t the end however, as depending on the difficulty you pick prior to starting the game, you have varying amounts of times after which players can respawn, which causes them to come back with their full load-out of ammo and resources filled back up.
One part of the Helldivers 2 experience that doesn’t make the jump from video game to tabletop is the galactic war. The designers considered including this important part of the original game. But it was inevitably dropped, thanks in part to Arrowhead wanting this game to feel unique and different and not simply a cut-and-paste board game simulation of the source material.
Jamie did reveal a fun and very Helldivers-esque piece of “lore” around the board game: “We’re positioning it effectively as a training simulation. So you would get this board game as a helldiver as a training simulation to learn how to be a better helldiver.” I’m keeping my fingers crossed that one day we will see Helldivers in the video game sitting around a table playing this board game.
Thanks to Nic, Jamie, and Derek’s talent, this latest release from Steamforged Games is already feeling pretty good. The three of them have made it a big focus that, despite the new medium, their goal is for it still to feel like a Helldivers game.
“We wanted to make sure that even though had different mechanics, it felt like Helldivers – like we want to have unexpected things that you have to deal with from turn to turn. We want to have stratagems that could go awry and actually blow up your friends in addition to the enemies. The pool of reinforcements that dwindles as you go through the game and calling in stratagems, those are things that feel uniquely Helldivers,” Nic said.
Derek added, “We knew we needed to keep the core loop of what Helldivers is with the mission objectives, and just being able to chase the shiny, right? We’ve got points of interest and sub-objectives and the objectives to uncover and find, while also having to deal with enemies that are, you know, trying to eat you.”
As it stands now, the core of the game and how everything works, Jamie estimates, is at around 75-80% locked in, which is right at the spot that Steamforged likes to have their games when they launch their campaigns. This bit of wiggle room will allow the team some flexibility based on community feedback, additional balance adjustments, or if they come up with a really cool idea. And for those that may be concerned with the recent events surrounding tariffs and their impacts on the board gaming space and the worries developers are having, Jamie stresses that right now it isn’t going to slow down their plans and that they are pressing ahead exactly as planned. If any adjustments need to be made, the studio has people to handle and advise them on the best course to take.
Coming off of my time with the prototype, I’d say the systems they have in place already are fun with things like the random events and the Massed Fire mechanic leading to some really epic moments during my games. At the same time though, while I appreciate and understand the decision to want more of a tactical focus with larger heavier-hitting enemies on the board, I do kind of wish that the gameplay had more little chump enemies on the board to wipe out with your friends. But that’s just how I like to enjoy the video game, too. Less thinking, more shooting. I also would like a bit more depth in how enemy attacks are handled, because right now it feels incredibly static compared to the rest of the game. Perhaps adding in a couple of different potential outcomes from an attack that are determined by a die roll would help bring enemy combat more on par with the chaos the other parts of the game delivers.
I’m eager to see what other surprises Steamforged Games has behind the curtain for Helldivers 2. What I’ve been able to play so far has left me antsy to try out new classes of Helldivers, discover what game types there will be, and mix and match all of them with the other enemies and biomes. All I know is that my friends and I are already asking: Where we dropping next?
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Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.
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